[thecoldground]

People do talk a whole load of rubbish on the whole don't they. My partner is doing graphic design, and generally gets doing video editing, music editing internet surfing with Firefox and about 30 tabs open at once, movies, even a little Vice City now and again:

ON A NETBOOK (with dual-core 1.6ghz intel atom, Windows 7 and 2gb ram). And yes, Photoshop does run fine. Seriously, do these people use computers, or do they just pretend? She's putting together a documentary together on that thing, it runs smooth as you like. My little brother ran Windows 2000 on 256mb of ram until about 6 months ago: he did evey average actvity on there (including video editing).

I'm sure these people overstate wildly to try and look cool. If a student asked me what laptop was best for £1,500, I would say spend about £400 and save the rest for rent. Even just going to PC World or Currys will net you something with about 4gb of ram. If Windows is a problem, get something compatible with Linux.

Honestly, for most people, they don't have genuine needs for computing power beyond that of computers released a decade ago. And if somebody would care to prove me wrong, I'm all ears.

(Edit: I'm not actually suggesting you use a netbook for everything: it's just an example to prove my point that most computing power goes wasted, and nobody should spend a ton of money unnecessarily)

[jamesvancollier]

So yeah, the new MacBook was announced yesterday.


This was posted from The Student Room's iPhone/iPad App

[theandyguthrie]

Hell yeah i just got my Zenbook Prime ux31A today


Highly recommended.

[tallen90]

OP, I don't care what you buy, but you don't need an i7 for image and video editing. For your purposes, you could get by with a first-gen i3 or lower, 2-4GB memory and integrated graphics. Seriously, save yourself some money, you can put £1500 to much better use than purchasing a single laptop computer.

In fact, you could buy a crappy £300 laptop and then still have enough left over to build a desktop with amazing specs.

[Sir Fox]

(Original post by littleone271)
I don't know an awful lot about ultrabooks but personally I wouldn't buy an acer because I've figured acer must have a bad reputation for a reason and I wouldn't want to risk it. I used to use dells and they didn't last very long (terrible build quality) so I wouldn't recommend one of those. [...]

Just to add a little objectivity: I have an Acer which will finish its second year in service soon, having survived one year in a West African country being used under terribly humid (rainy season) and dust-dry (dry season) conditions. Never had any issue.

Some people say that Dell has a terrible reputation, others pounce on Acer, many seem to abhore HP ... There seem to be only two truths in the world of laptops, the first one being that Apple builds exceptional machines of a superior quality (for horrendous prices, I'm not an Apple fanboy btw) and the second one saying that Lenovo's machines are rather clumsy but of quite a good quality and worth their money.

Apart from that everything related to reputation is subjective.

[littleone271]

(Original post by Sir Fox)
Just to add a little objectivity: I have an Acer which will finish its second year in service soon, having survived one year in a West African country being used under terribly humid (rainy season) and dust-dry (dry season) conditions. Never had any issue.

Some people say that Dell has a terrible reputation, others pounce on Acer, many seem to abhore HP ... There seem to be only two truths in the world of laptops, the first one being that Apple builds exceptional machines of a superior quality (for horrendous prices, I'm not an Apple fanboy btw) and the second one saying that Lenovo's machines are rather clumsy but of quite a good quality and worth their money.

Apart from that everything related to reputation is subjective.

Yeah.. I definitely agree with you and after reading this comment I'd be much more inclined to buy an Acer than I would have done before so thank you for enlightening me!

I agree with you about reputation being subjective. I guess we tend to hear stories and have bad experiences with certain products made by manufacturers and tar them all with the same brush when in actual fact - no technology is completely flawless and perfect. Apple products nearly always seem to be of a far superior quality to the alternatives offered by competitors in my opinion (I'm not an apple fangirl but I am an iPhone lover! lol) but I've had terrible experiences with mac laptops at college and I also think that they are overpriced although at least their products seem to hold their value better.

I would probably never buy a samsung product for instance unless perhaps it was a cheap (possibly second hand) netbook that I was using as a back up because I don't trust their manufacturing skills. I always remember how crap their mobile phones used to be and we've had countless problems with our samsung fridge. I realise they're completely different things and you can't assume that it bears any resemblance to the quality of their laptops but I'd just be very reluctant to spend money on anything made by them I guess which is probably a bit silly.

I bought my HP mainly because it had the best specs out of any of the other laptops in my price range as well as being nice to look at, having a hdmi port and lightscribe. After destroying two Dell laptops I wanted a change and I wasn't disappointed. I bought this laptop a year and a few months ago. It was about £400 I think which I thought was cheap at the time considering it has a core i3 (350M - 2.27GHz) processor, 4gb ram, 64 bit operating system and a 500gb hard drive. It does everything I want and when it dies I'll happily buy another HP.